Just the right touch: A few thoughts about In Every Wave by Charles Quimper and a link to my review at The Temz Review

It is a distinct challenge to attempt to write about a novel that is so delicate and spare, almost gossamer-like, without crushing it beneath the tip of your pen. In Every Wave, the latest offering from Quebec-based publisher, QC Fiction is such a novel—or rather, at just 80 pages—novella. To write too much, to attempt to over read it in the analysis, would not only spoil the emotional experience of encountering the novel without any specific expectations and, most critically, risks colouring the hauntingly open-ended conclusion which I feel can be rightfully read a number of ways.

When I write a review of a piece of fiction, I try to offer a way into the text—enough I hope for someone else to know if it might be of interest to them—but I try to be careful not to explicitly state how I understood the book. That kind of discussion is fine for a book club, even for a friendly online debate, but not for a review. There are several reasons for this. One is that my own feelings toward a work might not fully gel until weeks or months after I’ve finished reading it. The other, more important, is that the books I am most inclined to want to review, especially for publication elsewhere, have a level of ambiguity, an openness to multiple interpretations. That is what makes me want to go to the extra work involved in reading a text, often several times, and attempting to bring to it to life—just a little—on the page.

The premise of Charles Quimper’s In Every Wave (translated by Guil Lefebvre) is simple. After his young daughter is tragically lost on a summer holiday outing, a father’s world starts to crumble. The narrative, presented as an internalized monologue directed at the protagonist’s missing daughter, is fragmented, nonlinear, painfully realistic and disturbingly surreal in turns. Nothing is entirely certain—nothing but the aching, overwhelming grief that consumes the bereaved parents and destroys their relationship, altering their lives forever.

This brief, but indelible story is best approached without too many preconceptions, so I felt that writing about it necessitated the lightest touch. I hope I achieved that. My review, for the latest issue of The Tℇmz Review, is now online here.

It’s interesting to read about your process in reviewing. I think you more than achieved your aim on this review. I was completely pulled in and want to read it, and you wrote so beautifully about it, with compassion.